Jozef Bañuelos • Apr 27th, 2021
Over the last 6 months you may have noticed issues when trying to use your assets with Lingo’s Mac App. Specifically when trying to drag & drop or copy & paste assets from Lingo to other apps, you might get a low quality version or the wrong file format. We understand how frustrating it is when things just don’t work the way they’re supposed to. We are actively working on solving these issues, and we want to be transparent in what’s been going on behind the scenes. We’ll keep this blog post updated as we work through this.
Recently we released an update to the beta app that includes some improvements around downloading and copying assets. We hope these updates improve the experience for using your assets in the mac app.
Currently assets display a small “cloud” download icon in the upper right that indicates the asset needs to be downloaded locally so you can use it. This icon had low-contrast and was easy to miss. We’ve updated it to look similar to the download button you see on the web app so it’s more prominent.
Additionally, once you do download an asset (or if it’s downloaded automatically) you’ll see a copy icon appear in the button. This makes it more apparent that you need to download an asset first before you can “use” it. So now the flow is much more linear: Click download > you’re ready to use. This flow is also reflected in the inspector panel.
Our intent is that these changes keep you you informed as to what’s happening with your assets as you try to use them. Previously there was no way to know you had to download an asset first before you could copy & paste it. Dragging & dropping will still trigger an automatic download if the asset was not downloaded previously.
If you’ve been having issues with any of this in the mac app, please try out the beta and let us know if you have any feedback on these changes. Thank you!
To start, the mac app was largely made possible thanks to the capabilities provided by macOS. We leveraged the built in image processing features of the Mac to generate the thumbnails you see in the gallery. That also provided file cuts (a PNG file from an SVG for example) for all of your assets in real time as you copied or dragged them to your favorite apps. The only downside with this was that the mac app needed to have the original files for every asset.
This worked great for a while but as Lingo grew, so did our customers asset libraries. This began to push Lingo to its limits with large image libraries containing hundreds of GB of assets. Which meant anyone using the Mac app in an organization would end up with a copy of every asset stored on their Mac even if they never used a single one. Not only did this take up space on their computers unnecessarily, it also led to long waits for assets to load when they first opened a kit in Lingo. In some cases it took a full day for all the assets and their thumbnails to load.
So we introduced an update that fundamentally changed they way Lingo’s Mac app stored your assets. And — consequentially — how you used them. Our intention was that no matter how large your asset library is, Lingo would be blazing fast while taking up minimal storage on your computer. Unfortunately, this update introduced some unforeseen issues.
At this point the Lingo digital asset management API was now generating thumbnails for all of your assets to power our web app. This meant the Mac app no longer needed to download the original asset file and generate its own thumbnails using built in macOS capabilities. So, the Mac app wouldn’t need to store every single asset on your computer and take up storage.
Unfortunately, not downloading the original files for assets beforehand meant that they weren’t ready to “use” when you needed them. This is the one thing we did foresee, but we thought we had a solution for it.
macOS has options for apps to perform a drag & drop without needing to provide the file until the drag & drop is completed. These are called file promises.
So essentially Lingo would be able to download the file and have it ready by the time a drag & drop finished. This was the ideal solution in which it didn’t matter if the asset was downloaded or not because Lingo would download it when you needed it.
This seemed perfect! Except for a few caveats:
The first problem of the destination app needing to support file promises was much more problematic than we initially thought. Adobe, Sketch, Figma, and many of the most popular design tools don’t support them.
For those apps, dragging & dropping an asset that isn’t downloaded results in a small, low-res thumbnail of the asset being placed in the app. This ended up being a very frustrating experience.
Our first attempt to solve this was to mirror what Apple Photos does in this situation. Which is to display a notification that let you know a low quality export was used and you would need to download the asset first. While this helped explain what went wrong, it didn’t change the fact that using assets from the Mac app was not as easy as it was before.
We realized that was a less-than-ideal solution. So we tried to simplify the process a little more in Lingo 12.4 by making the download automatic. Now Lingo detects when you drag a non-downloaded asset to an app that does not support file promises, then we begin the download. After that, Lingo lets you know when it’s done, and automatically adds it to your clipboard. This still isn’t ideal but an improvement on the first solution.
That’s where we are now. Lingo 12.4 was released April 23, 2021. Drag & drop for some assets is still a multi step process to get the original — still not ideal. And copy/paste still requires you to download the asset first with no guidance about doing so from Lingo. Also not great.
We’re also aware of issues with Adobe CC apps especially, which outright don’t work in some cases (inDesign). This is because of a mix of things, but mainly comes down to Adobe apps not supporting file promises and/or certain file types.
With all that being said, this issue matters to us and we don’t want to leave the Mac app in this state. We’re actively working on coming up with an all new solution that makes the best of the limited clipboard functionality macOS allows. Thank you for bearing with us while we work on it.